* * * *

They were awakened by the usual concert of hee-haws, as the burros, who
followed at their heels all day like dogs, (except when they got
contrary), woke the echoes with their loneliness.

That day led them over another of the parallel ridges that comb the West
flank of the Sierra, and into a precipitous canyon, over red sandstones
and green shales, and slates of Tertiary formation, till they came to
another hot spring and decided to pitch camp and all hands make use of
the hot water. A natural bath tub and a smaller wash tub were found
hollowed out of the stony banks, doubtless carved by whirling bowlders
from the spring floods, and with the joy known only to the weary camper
they performed their ablutions, filling the tubs, each in turn, by means
of the nested pails. What grinding and whirling it must have taken, they
reflected, as they felt the smoothness of their symmetrical bowls, to
have hollowed these from the solid rock! With accompaniment of drift logs
tumbling end for end, as the river rose and foamed beneath the thousand
trickles of melting snow!

"Ever been up here in winter?" Ace asked the old prospector.

"Not exactly here, but I been places almighty like it."

The old prospector told them how, in the days of the 49ers, (vivid
recollections of which his father had collated to his youthful ears), the
Mexicans had been treated in a way they had practically never forgiven.
The land was free. Discovery and appropriation of a mining claim gave
title, provided it was staked out and a notice scratched on a tin plate
affixed to the claim stake, and likewise provided that the size of the
claim accorded with the crude ruling for that region. Fifty feet was
generally allowed along a river, or even a hundred where the claim was
uncommonly poor and inaccessible, though where it was uncommonly rich,
miners were sometimes restricted to ten square feet apiece.

But Mexicans were generally refused the benefits of the gold claims, the
"greasers" often being ejected by force of arms from the more valuable
claims. Sometimes they were given three hours' grace for their get-away.
More within the letter of the law, a tax was imposed on alien claim
holders, but at first such a heavy one that it was practically
prohibitive. This resulted in border warfare, and to many of the Mexicans
originally on the land, abject poverty. At the Mexican dry diggings,
which, with their bull rings and fandangoes, had sp